An invoice that is not being paid: the steps in order

Chasing money you are owed is mostly a procedure problem, not an argument. Doing the steps in the right order is what keeps the cost proportionate and what makes the file usable if it ends up before a judge.

Step one: a dated reminder

Send a written reminder with the invoice number, the amount, the due date and a short deadline to pay. Email is fine, but keep the sent copy. Most late payments are administrative — a lost invoice, a changed contact, a holiday — and a reminder settles them.

Step two: formal notice

If nothing happens, the next step is a formal notice: a registered letter that names the amount, refers to the earlier reminder, sets a final deadline and says what you will do next. This is the document that fixes the moment from which interest and, in business-to-business relationships, a compensation for recovery costs can run. Between traders, Belgian law on late payment sets default interest and a fixed recovery fee; between a trader and a consumer, the rules on reminder charges are stricter and worth reading before you add any fee.

Step three: the choice

From here there are three routes. A conciliation before the justice of the peace is cheap and sometimes enough to produce a payment plan. For undisputed commercial debts there is a simplified recovery procedure run by a bailiff, which avoids a full hearing. And there is the ordinary claim, which is what a genuinely disputed invoice needs — a client who says the work was defective is not a debt collection matter, it is a dispute about performance.

What it costs, and who pays

Court costs in Belgium include a filing fee and a procedural indemnity — a fixed contribution to the winner's lawyer's fees, set by scale according to the amount in dispute. It rarely covers the whole bill. That matters most on small invoices, where the honest advice is sometimes that a payment plan beats a judgment.

Before you start

Have the contract or order confirmation, the invoice, proof of delivery or of the work done, and the correspondence in one file. A lawyer who sees all four in the first meeting can usually tell you in ten minutes whether this is a collection or a dispute, and the answer decides everything after it.

This page is general information about how these matters usually work in Belgium. It is not legal advice about your own case, and only a lawyer who has read your documents can give you that.